Thanks to your brand ambassadors — aka your employees — traditional advertising no longer needs to be your primary driver for sales. Recommendations and endorsements from advocates have a greater impact on your brand's perception than ads, banners, and other traditional marketing methods.
Have you identified the employees who have proven to be your most loyal advocates? You can invite them into a private online community to communicate with them, create content for them to engage with, and ask them to like, share, and interact with your content on social media — or give you input and feedback on topics that matter.
Two-way communication
Building a community of employees adds value for your brand, but don't forget to think about the value for them. Keeping advocates engaged can be challenging, but the community is designed to help you do that. The primary goal is to create two-way communication between your brand and your employees. As a brand, you share unique insights into what's happening at your company; in return, your advocates share their perspective on all kinds of topics. Once trust is established, the community can be used for much more: referrals, social sharing, internal feedback, and more.
Ambassador DNA
Good employees add value to a brand. Great employees are part of your brand — they advocate for it and recommend it to friends and family without hesitation. When you invite these employees into your private community, consider them part of your brand's family. That's why it's worth thinking carefully about who to invite and whether they'll be responsive to the content you publish.
Visualizing a community
By now, you might be wondering what a community actually looks like. The primary building blocks are the campaigns (1) you create to ask your advocates to interact with, (2) the points they collect when they do, and (3) the leaderboard, where they can see how many points they've earned and how they rank among their colleagues.
Campaigns
In a community, you ask your employees to complete different actions via what we call campaigns. When creating a campaign, you can choose from six types depending on what you'd like your advocates to do:
Like, comment, or share our content — ask them to amplify a specific post or article on social media
Post their own content — invite them to write and share something in their own words
Follow us on social media — help grow your company's following on a specific network
Give input about a topic — gather opinions, run a poll, or collect ideas
Check out our content — direct them to a piece of content you want them to read or watch
Provide us with referrals — ask them to refer job candidates, leads, or new customers
You can also set a campaign as required — meaning ambassadors must complete it before they can access any other campaigns in the community. This is useful for onboarding, compliance, or any time-sensitive message that every advocate needs to see. More information can be found here.
More information on how to build campaigns can be found here.
Points
Your advocates' interactions are genuinely valuable to your brand. To create healthy and friendly competition, you can reward your advocates with points for completing campaigns. Points let them climb the leaderboard and, if you choose to enable it, save up to claim a reward.
Leaderboard
The leaderboard helps keep your community members engaged — every action they complete earns points, which lets them move up the ranking. For employee advocacy programs, this often plays out as a lighthearted contest among colleagues.
If you choose to enable rewards, your advocates can exchange their points for rewards of your choosing, fully configurable and entirely up to you. More information about rewards can be found here.